SERETIS NOTES

  Finland used to follow a policy of neutrality, staying out of military alliances, especially to avoid upsetting Russia. That changed in April 2023 when Finland joined NATO, abandoning decades of staying neutral. Since joining, Finland has dramatically changed its defense strategy. The country now has NATO’s longest shared land border with Russia, making it a key area for the alliance’s defensive planning.

  Given the United States Navy’s lackluster performance against the Houthis and their jury-rigged missiles, one shudders to think about how badly a proposed invasion of Venezuela could go if that invasion is built around a US aircraft carrier. No matter how advanced the Ford may be (or well protected), she could easily be damaged by an errant Russian-made missile fired from Venezuela

  Graham called the proposed peace plan between Ukraine and Russia “an opportunity to end the war with honor and justice.” He stressed that Congress should be allowed to examine the document, just as it reviews nuclear agreements with Iran. Lasting peace in Ukraine, he said, must include guarantees that would prevent Russia from launching another invasion. In his view, congressional oversight would help secure that outcome. Graham should sit down and shut up. He is a war hawk and it is not his decision or congress to give green light on any peace agreement. The people, the leaders of both Ukraine and Russia, ae the ones that will agree or not.

  Russian jets entered Estonia's airspace today for 12 minutes. Current Time  0:02 / Duration  0:22 TCE Russische bommenwerpers en gevechtsvliegtuigen onderschept nabij Alaska 0 View on Watch Germany’s push to make its army the strongest in Europe is essential given the threat posed by Russia to the continent where a conflict with Moscow would differ greatly to the attritional warfare currently seen in Ukraine, a military adviser has told  Newsweek .  German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had  pledged  in May to transform the Bundeswehr (the nation’s armed forces), and along with  proposed legislation  to boost troop numbers revealed last week, Berlin has shown its intentions to boost its military in the coming years

  Economist Justin Wolfers noted Wednesday that while President Donald Trump may have just rolled back tariffs on some imported grocery items such as coffee and bananas, most tariffs remain in place — and so do the damaging economic consequences of them.

  Verizon Communications will begin notifying employees Thursday if they are affected by its largest-ever round of layoffs, the company’s chief executive said in an all-staff email viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Verizon plans to lay off more than 13,000 employees as part of CEO Dan Schulman’s plan to aggressively reduce the company’s entire cost base. Verizon is facing fierce competition for both wireless-service and home-internet customers, and Schulman said he plans to reverse a recent trend of customer losses It's all about the bottom line. Make more profits by hurting people's lives.

  The nearly 42 million low-income Americans on the  Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)  will have to reapply for benefits under a planned overhaul of the program in an effort to cut down on “fraud,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told news outlets in the wake of the government reopening last week. Drug test them as well

  Zohran Mamdani has backed a controversial choice for his replacement in the New York State Assembly who once said 'white supremacy' was to blame for the attacks on September 11, 2001. Aber Kawas, a Palestinian-American activist who only moved to the district last year, has received Mamdani's backing in her fight to take his seat in the state's 36th district in a special election, The New York Daily News reported. The mayor-elect endorsement has gained the 34-year-old newfound attention on some of her more extreme opinions, including one dug up from an Asian American Writers' Workshop in 2017

  The 50 year mortgage will destroy the people. The Trump administration has put forward its own plan to fix this problem, a 50-year mortgage, meaning the average first-time homebuyer, who is 41 years old, will still be making mortgage payments in their 90s. who wants to pay a mortgage when they are in their 90

  People associated with the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have reacted after U.S. President Donald Trump announced he supported the release of files associated with Jeffrey Epstein. Posting on X, MAGA figures responded to Trump’s Sunday Truth Social post urging House Republicans that “we have nothing to hide” about Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting sex trafficking charges. Good call on the President. If he has nothing to hide show the files and shut the critics up

  U.S President Donald Trump has continued his pursuit to take over Venezuela’s massive oil reserves and is considering military options to control the world’s largest oil reserves, estimated at more than 300 billion barrels In private talks with senior officials and aides in recent weeks, Trump has held high-level meetings to review plans ranging from targeted strikes on Venezuelan forces to seizing strategic oil fields. This would be a huge costly mistake if President Trump makes a move. I do not think China or Russia will sit back and watch

  Economists by and large have agreed that tariffs are harmful, ultimately producing no positive results for either the tariff-enacting country or the recipients. Arguably the hardest-hit victims of Donald Trump’s 2025 tariff war are the American people. Trump’s tariffs have resulted in the most brutally regressive tax possible on Americans. U.S. businesses pay the import tax on foreign goods they purchase and have passed  55 percent of that cost onto consumers  in 2025, according to Goldman Sachs.

  Senior military officials on Wednesday presented President Trump with updated options for potential operations in   Venezuela , including strikes on land, according to multiple sources familiar with the meetings at the White House.  Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and other senior officials briefed the president on military options for the coming days, the sources said.

  As the regime of Nicolas Maduro is a  perennial nuisance  to its neighbors—including Brazil—there have long been tensions between the two South American powers. There has also been a  documented  case where the Brazilian FAB shot down an aircraft alleged to be traffickers flying from Venezuela to Brazil. In other words, Brazil’s air force did exactly what the United States Navy has been doing off the coast of Venezuela: destroying the vessels of suspected drug traffickers.

  House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries's constant assertion of a "Republican healthcare crisis" linked to the potential expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits fails to acknowledge a key legislative reality: the enhanced subsidies were temporary, Democratic-crafted measures, not permanent fixtures blocked by Republicans.

  The Washington Post editorial board asserted that a "new era of class warfare has begun" in New York City after Mayor-elect   Zohran Mamdani   won last week’s election — criticizing what it described as his "change in character" since the campaign. In a  Saturday editorial  titled "Zohran Mamdani drops the mask," the Post slammed the mayor-elect for his "seething" victory speech, arguing that Mamdani "abandoned his cool disposition" and showed the world what he really stands for

 Zohran Mamdani the newly elected mayor of New York city is constantlly and publicly going after Trump and his policies as if he's campaigning to become president soon.  It seems his hidden vision of becoming president is more in focus than than his focus on the city he was elected

  In Tuesday’s   off-year election cycle , Spanberger, a Democrat so moderate that she is a former CIA operative and was a leading member of the House of Representative’s bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus”, took her own advice and handily defeated Winsome Earle-Sears, Virginia’s incumbent Republican lieutenant governor, to win the race for the governor’s mansion. In New York, however, Zohran Mamdani doubled down against her anti-socialist admonition and loudly announced himself as a socialist. He has declared that capitalism is “theft”, that billionaires should not exist, that “whiter” neighbourhoods in New York should be taxed more, that a range of public services should be “free”, and that government-mandated price controls should govern food and housing. He took more than half of New York City’s mayoral vote and utterly humiliated his disgraced chief rival, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York.

  Russia has announced that Moscow will consider providing Venezuela with its advanced Oreshnik midrange ballistic missile as the Donald Trump administration ramps up its military presence in the Caribbean nation. Deputy Head of the State Duma’s Defense Committee, Alexey Zhuravlev, said Russia already supplies weapons to Venezuela and that nothing prevents it from delivering the Oreshnik missile to Caracas.